Environmentally Preferable Procurement (EPP)

The American Cleaning Institute (ACI) is active in states that have a legislative, regulatory or executive mandate on cleaning product procurement in a given jurisdiction.

ACI has been substantially engaged in environmentally preferable procurement issues. ACI is recognized for its contributions in many areas including standards development, and work with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on developing its environmentally preferable purchasing guidance. ACI encourages market-based approaches and solutions that address environmental and state procurement issues.

News...

ACI shared comments with USDA on the Department’s plans to include chemical intermediates within the USDA BioPreferred program. Specifically, this would add 12 sections that will designate the product categories within which biobased products would be afforded procurement preference by Federal agencies and their contractors.

"The designation of substances into the proposed twelve ‘product categories’ appears to be arbitrary as the categories range from very narrowly defined groups to extremely broad categories," wrote ACI’s Kathleen Stanton. "The scope of some of these categories falls outside the USDA definition of a ‘product category’ - a grouping of specific products that perform a similar function. ACI recommends categorizing intermediates based on functional use descriptions. In addition, as noted by USDA in the public notice, the analytical method (ASTM standard D6866) by which all the products in the BioPreferred Program is measured is imprecise. ACI recommends that a validation study be performed in order to better understand the ranges of inaccuracies across a number of intermediates and products."

May 5, 2015: In making changes to the EPA’s Safer Product Labeling Program – formerly Design for the Environment – the agency has disregarded a number of guidelines related to the process of developing standards, measuring their environmental effectiveness, and managing the standards programs, according to ACI. View our complete comments here.